Obituary

Charles Burton Martin died peacefully on 23rd October 2008 in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Martin, known always as ‘Charlie’, was an imposing figure with wide ranging interests that included art, poetry, rare books, cooking, and devotion to his far-flung family. Born in the Boston suburb of Chelsea, Massachusetts, he entered Boston University in 1944, graduating with an AB in philosophy in 1948. He earned admission to Emmanuel College, Cambridge partly on the strength of an undergraduate honours thesis on Spinoza that had impressed A. C. Ewing. At Cambridge Martin studied with John Wisdom, but spurned the Wittgensteinian ethos then sweeping the philosophical scene. He was awarded a PhD in 1959. His thesis, Religious Belief, was published the same year. Martin spent two years (1951–53) at Oxford, attending Ryle’s lectures and seminars before accepting a position in 1954 at the University of Adelaide, joining J. J. C. Smart and U. T. Place. In Adelaide, Martin dived into discussions that culminated in Place’s and Smart’s influential articles on central state materialism—the mind–brain identity theory. In 1966, he took up a post at the University of Sydney alongside D. M. Armstrong, who had moved from Melbourne to Sydney two years earlier. Martin was professor of philosophy at Sydney until 1971, when he accepted a professorship at the University of Calgary. He retired to Medicine Hat, Alberta, in 2001. Although he came of age in a philosophical climate dominated by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the influence of these philosophers on Martin appears to have been wholly negative. In an era obsessed with conceptual analysis, he insisted on ontological candour. From the 1950s he vigorously opposed verificationist-inspired behaviourist conceptions of mentality, promoting the importance of causality in accounts of the mind (functionalism’s core thesis). Martin’s contention (in Religious Belief) that perception was causally loaded predated Grice’s famous defence of the causal theory of perception in 1961. In 1966 Martin published, with Max Deutscher, an influential paper, ‘Remembering’, defending the idea that memories were, of necessity, linked causally to the past. Until the 1980s, and in common with many of his contemporaries in the 1950s and 60s, Martin preferred to work out ideas in lectures and discussions with students and colleagues, rather than seeing them through to print. One result is that Martin’s philosophical influence has been largely indirect, coming by way of other philosophers—in Australia, the United Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 87, No. 1, pp. 177–179; March 2009

States, Britain, and Canada, and a battery of high-powered philosophical correspondents, including David Armstrong, David Lewis, Jack Smart, and the neuroscientist, Rodolfo Llinas. Twenty-first century philosophers whose views reflect positions originally championed by Martin are often oblivious of their source.
Although a longstanding opponent of dualism, Martin was never comfortable with the reductionist side of Australian materialism. States of mind are internal states that play certain causal roles, but they are, in his view, qualitatively distinctive too. Indeed their causal roles depend on their qualitative nature. A common mistake, according to Martin, is to imagine that qualities are uniquely mental: every property is both a power and a quality, both dispositional and qualitative. He was, at first, inclined to regard properties as 'two-sided': properties have qualitative and dispositional 'faces'. This would require a brute connection between qualities and powers, however, an ontological aberration. More recently, he came to advocate the 'surprising identity' of qualities with powers: properties are powerful qualities.
The surprising identity evokes his hero, Locke, as does Martin's account of substance ('Substance Substantiated', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1980), and his acceptance of Locke's maxim that 'all things that exist are particulars'. Properties, Martin held are 'tropes', particular ways particular substances are. In contrast to most contemporary friends of tropes, however, he favoured a two-category ontology. Objects are not bundles of tropes. Tropes are had by, are modifications of, particular substances. Following Locke, Martin thought of substances as substrata, but denied that this requires a notion of bare, featureless particulars. Tropes are ways particular substances are; every substance must be some way or other. As ways substances are, tropes are 'non-transferable'. Socrates's whiteness is Socrates's whiteness, a way Socrates is. Martin thus rejected 'trope transfer' accounts of causation according to which causal relations involve a property's migrating from a cause to its effect. Such views, he argued, belong to a tradition of 'pipeline' theories of the kind espoused by Descartes who held that whatever is in an effect must already be present in its total efficient cause.
Martin's The Mind in Nature (Oxford, 2008) provides a synoptic view of his mature thinking on topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Mental properties differ from physical properties, not in being immaterial, but qualitatively. Because every property is qualitative and dispositional, qualitativity and dispositionality permeate the physical and mental realms. Nature includes both. Although we find it convenient to talk of the world as comprising objects-particular substances-possessing properties and interacting in various ways, such a view ultimately leads to an unacceptable conception of objects as possessing indefinite boundaries. We can resolve these difficulties in a way that comports nicely with the world as physicists tell us it is by embracing a conception of the world as a single substance. Ordinary objects, then, are ways this substance is-tropes! Martin came full circle from an undergraduate thesis on Spinoza, through Locke, and back to Spinoza.
A philosopher's philosopher, Martin was vigorous in discussion, always two steps ahead in an argument. In disagreeing with him, colleagues often experienced a sinking feeling, realizing that they would, in the end, be forced to concede. His early unwavering opposition to Oxford-style 'linguisticized' philosophy and to philosophical theses tinged with verificationism helped set the course of work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind in the second half of the twentieth century. Charlie Martin was, without a doubt, a philosopher of great depth with few peers, a philosopher whose influence will persist when the rest of us are forgotten.